La Tray delves deep in new book

His father, who was Métis, didn’t talk about it, preferring to keep his identity hidden.

In La Tray’s new book, “Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home,” he unravels the mystery of his family heritage. Through interviews with friends, relatives and Indigenous people across the region, La Tray outlines how the Métis contributed to Montana and examines what it means to be Métis today.

The word “Métis” (pronounced maytee) is French for mixed blood. When capitalized, it refers to people who comprise the mixing of cultures, primarily Ojibwe, Cree and Assiniboine people mixing with Europeans. The Métis’ contributions to the region, La Tray writes, “have been largely erased by historians, who thought the Métis weren’t Indian enough to be mentioned with the savages, but also not white enough to get credited for anything innovative or historically crucial.”

The book interweaves La Tray’s personal story with the rich history of the Métis. His reporting takes him across the state — from Elder Al Wiseman’s home in Choteau, and the Holiday Inn in Great Falls where the Little Shell celebrated federal recognition, to the late historian Nicholas Vrooman’s second-floor office in Helena, and a college in North Dakota to meet Les LaFountain, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa historian.

La Tray is the poet laureate of Montana. He is the author of “One-Sentence Journal” and “Descended from a Travel-Worn Satchel,” and he writes a regular newsletter called “An Irritable Métis.”

He will be discussing “Becoming Little Shell” at a book release event at the Missoula Public Library this Wednesday evening. The book officially published earlier this month, and Missoula’s Fact and Fiction Bookstore said it has already sold around 1,000 copies. Lee Montana’s Indigenous communities reporter Nora Mabie sat down with La Tray at a coffee shop in Helena to talk more about “Becoming Little Shell.” Their conversation is below (edited for length and clarity).

Nora Mabie: This could’ve been a book for historians or history buff s. Instead, it’s incredibly readable — you write colloquially, you bring us with you on your personal journey and you often engage directly with the reader. Can you talk more about your decision to make this work accessible?

Chris La Tray: Well I think about what I like to read, and I’m not an academic. … At one point, I was someone who just didn’t know anything but wanted to. And I got contacted by people in that same position. So I wanted to write the book that I would’ve liked to read when I was trying to learn.

My other concern was that because this is so different from “One-Sentence Journal,” I was afraid that because this is not that kind of book, that whatever it was that was so attractive to people about “One Sentence Journal” would be lost in this. But thankfully that’s just my voice. That’s just how I write.

I appreciate how you interwove your personal story with Métis history. Can you talk about your decision to include yourself in the story?

I owe that to Milkweed Editions. You know my editor Daniel Slager, he really pushed me. After the first draft, he said, “We need more of you.” So the second draft was putting a lot of that stuff in there. Because I was writing it from the perspective of trying to take myself out of it, like when you’re writing as a journalist. So I had to go back and put all that stuff in.

Really hard. Really hard. Because I realized I was kind of intentionally not putting myself in it. It’s not like I’m telling all my dark secrets, but it was just hard. I’m pretty private. I write personally in my newsletter, but I’m private. I don’t like to talk about my family, to respect their privacy, so it’s hard. I don’t even know if I went as far as they wanted me to, but I went as far as I could.

There’s one point in the book where you talk to Al Wiseman, Little Shell elder and cultural leader. He was close with your dad — yet the two of them took very diff erent paths. Wiseman embraced Métis identity, and you write how your father was unwilling to do so. The parts of the book with your dad were incredibly emotional, and I know he’s since passed away. Did writing the book change how you think of him or your relationship?

It helped me understand him more because he never talked about it. So talking to other people, I was able to come to an understanding, in some ways, of why my dad was the way he was. That understanding helps.

I really wonder how he would feel about this book because he would angrily deny any connection to this, and I would want to say, “Dad! We are proud people. We did a lot. We achieved. We are such a huge part of why Montana is the way it is. The good parts. We were a mighty culture, and there’s no reason we can’t still be that.”

I wonder how he’d feel about that.

I loved the scene in the book where you attend the Little Shell quarterly meeting. You’re excited and expecting life-altering news on whether you will become an officially enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe. There’s a lot of build-up, and then the moment is kind of anti-climactic — you anticipate an announcement of new members, but there is none. Instead, you find out after the meeting that your enrollment application was approved. Later, you get emotional about your status as a tribal member. Can you further describe that moment and what it ultimately meant to you?

You live with a certain amount of doubt. There’s always that story in the news where someone said their relative was Native and they really aren’t. So even though this was something I identified with my whole life, there was still that moment where they could say, “Well no, actually you’re not.”

So I delayed getting the DNA test for quite a long time for this same fear. … The meeting felt like, this is it. It’s like stepping out into a river and you’ve been on the bank watching and wondering if you could survive it. And then all of a sudden, you’re in the middle of it.

And I had a similar experience a few months ago with my son. … For years, he didn’t know if he should try to enroll or not, and last summer, he finally decided he would.

… I got a text from him with a photograph of the letter saying his enrollment was accepted, and it was the same thing all over again. I was sitting in a restaurant, and I started crying. I was just so joyful for him. He’d had some hardships, and he really wanted to be part of this.

And I just said, you know, “Welcome to thousands of years of badassery.”

You make a point in the book that the Métis are “hidden in plain sight.” You liken their contributions to Easter eggs — something you have to look for. Métis history is critical to Montana, and yet, that history isn’t necessarily easy to access. You write that you really have to make an eff ort to know this stuff . You grew up near Council Grove and didn’t know it was the site of the signing of the 1855 Hellgate Treaty. What do you want people to understand about Little Shell or Métis history and how should they go about learning more?

So in Montana, we have this mandate, a legislative mandate, to teach Native history and culture in schools, and it’s been shoved off . Our Indian Caucus has doubled down on making it happen. And that’s where it has to happen. We can’t force adults to keep interested in something when the whole world is devoted to distracting them from anything but entertainment and spending money. But we can start in schools. My friend Anna East helped me develop a curriculum for middle schoolers through the Office of Public Instruction. So any school in the state can teach an eight-part history of the Little Shell, and any student can learn that. We’re trying to do more of that kind of thing.

And then I go out and talk to people. Every time I talk, someone is like, “I had no idea.” And why would they? Because there was a concerted eff ort to erase us. It’s not like it just didn’t matter and nobody paid attention — it was a concerted eff ort to erase us. The fact that the United States doesn’t recognize the Métis as a distinct culture is a calculated eff ort to erase us. So, it’s up to us — those of us who are moved to carry that torch and do what we can to educate others.

You talk a lot about treaties in the book. At one point you write, “Treaty documents aren’t dead either, they live on in the lives of the descendants of those people, who did their best to protect future generations by participating in their creation.” What do you want more people to know about treaties?

For me, it defines how we live together in the community where I grew up and where I live now. Next to the flooding of Lake Missoula, nothing has defined how the people in that valley interact more than the Hellgate Treaty. That’s because it opened up so much land to people who had no respect for that land.

You do a great job of reimagining the past, bringing the reader into a historical moment. There’s a scene where you imagine the Plains tribes hearing the roaring screeches of settler trains from many miles away. You put this into familiar terms for readers, saying if the trains were on Reserve Street in Missoula, it would mean someone could hear them from miles away on Mullan Road, for example.

You do this again when you put yourself — and readers — in the shoes of Chief Little Shell. “Imagine you’re abroad somewhere, vacationing, visiting family or working … and return to find someone else in your house, having been sold to them out from under you by someone who never owned it in the first place. … How devastating that would be when you realized there was absolutely nothing you could do about it?”

Can you talk about your decision to bring readers into the past? How do you get in that mindset yourself?

I’ve always been daydreaming, and that’s part of it. I never had any of that educated out of me because I have a high school diploma. I never studied writing, I never had anybody telling me how I should be doing things, so it came naturally to me. When I was a kid, I was a fan of “Lord of the Rings,” so I’d go out in the woods and imagine orcs. Now, when I drive across Montana, I imagine the whole vista full of buffalo. I think, “What would that have felt like?” So, I’m constantly in this position imagining what it would be like. What would it be like to have all these strangers moving into your yard? And there’s nothing you can do about it. We wouldn’t stand for that, yet that was expected.

I live in multiple worlds at the same time. The imagination and the real one. That’s just kind of the Indigenous worldview.

You write, “I set out to write this book as a Little Shell person in service to my Little Shell people, but now I find myself a Little Shell person in service to the world.” What do you want readers to take away from this book?

What happened to us is happening to other people right now. Whether it’s the housing crisis, whether it’s people being separated from their families at the border, whether it’s Israel invading and just scorched-earth murdering Palestinians … it’s all the same. That’s what happened to us.

… I want people to understand that we are all living shoulder to shoulder with people who have suffered because of these things. And for us to get along, we have to realize and recognize how much we have in common. People who maybe haven’t suffered directly need to have empathy for people who have. I want everybody to read it … because I think people knowing our story can raise empathy to make the world better. La Tray is holding a number of “Becoming Little Shell” book events across the state this month. Visit chrislatray.com/events for more information.